5th and 6th Grade Reading Tigers

Summer Reading is AWESOME!

6th Grade students are required to read Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. I will be posting summeries to the chapters throughout the summer. These summaries will help students comprehend and remember important parts of the story. There is NO summer packet for students to complete.

Chapter 1

We begin on a beautiful spring day. The narrator is just leaving his office, and he is very specific in telling us that this is a perfectly normal day.
There is nothing special about it at all, nothing whatsoever, nada, zip.
While thinking about all this normalness, he hears the sounds of a dogfight.
He doesn't think much about it until he sees the fight: a handful of dogs are teamed up against a redbone hound.
He watches as one after another these dogs try to attack the hound. He decides to help the hound, saying, "I had seen the time when an old hound like that had given his life so that I might live" (1.8). Hmmm, sounds to us like there's a story there.
He wades into the fight (don't try this at home, Shmoopers), and shoos off all the attacking dogs.
On closer inspection, the narrator sees that the dog is dirty and skinny, and has a homemade collar. Clearly this is a country dog, not a city dog.
We also find out that the dog's name is Buddie (cute), and most likely belongs to a little boy.
The narrator, whose name we still don't know, takes the dog home. He feeds him and cleans him up.
Buddie hangs around that evening and all the next day, but by the next evening he is restless to be on his way.
Letting him go, the narrator watches Buddie walk away into the sunset.
For the rest of the chapter, the narrator reflects on who Buddie might have been and where he might have come from: "something drastic must have happened in his life, as it is very unusual for a hound to be traveling all alone" (1.30).
His reflections on Buddie lead him to memories of his boyhood days, and two hounds of his own. He tells us that the story is a sad one, so be prepared with a tissue. Actually, scratch that, grab a whole box.
The narrator returns to his house, but leaves the gate open just in case Buddie wants to come back.
Come on, dude, you can't take a dog from a little boy.
In his house, he builds a fire and examines two cups on the mantel. One is gold and the other, slightly smaller, cup is silver.
Looking at the cups, the narrator begins to remember the story behind them, probably complete with flashback music and wavy visual effect.

Chapter 2

Chapter two opens with puppy love. No, not the boy-meets-girl kind of puppy love, but actual puppy puppy love. We mean the kind with four legs and a tail.
The narrator, Billy, has sent us back to a time when he was 10 years old.
So, the narrator is 10 years old and deeply, deeply, deeply in love with dogs. (Girls have cooties.)
But not just any dog, he wants a coonhound (a type of hound that hunts raccoons. Hey, truth in advertising).
And he doesn't just want one; he wants two.
This is a problem. See Billy's family is going through a bit of hard luck and doesn't have any extra money. But does this deter Billy? Not a chance.
He continues to ask his parents.
His dad tells him flat out they don't have the money. His mom says he's too young to be hunting with hounds, and that he can't have a gun till he's 21 anyway.
Don't anyone tell the NRA about that.
Billy is bummed. They live in primo hunting country, and Billy has been wandering the woods tracking raccoons for as long as he can remember. This kid would lie for hours just staring at raccoon tracks, thinking about their cute little hands, and wanting to kill them.
Billy's dog crush gets worse. He starts to lose weight and his parents become concerned about his health, but there is nothing they can do because they don't have any extra money.
So Billy decides to make the ultimate sacrifice. He tells his dad he could live with just one dog rather than two.
Dad tells him how hard times are and that if he could he would buy him the hounds in an instant. This breaks poor little Billy's heart, and he cries himself to sleep.
To be honest, it probably breaks his dad's heart, too.
Things perk up for Billy the next day when his dad brings him home three small steel traps from the town store.
Billy starts trapping anything he can. Unfortunately, his most common catch is the house cat Sammie, until Sammie gets fed up with the constant threat of death and leaves home.
Billy continues to play with his traps, and the only thing he can't trap is a raccoon.
But he has fun anyway setting his traps and collecting his game.
You know how when you get a new toy it seems like the most amazing thing ever, but after a while the fun sort of wears off? That's exactly what happened with Billy, only worse. Trapping in the woods had given him bloodlust (or something), and now he wants some hunting dogs more than ever.
When hunting season opens, he hears hounds all night in the woods. He starts to lose weight again and stops sleeping.
His mom is worried, but his dad figures he's been cooped up all winter and just needs to get out in the sun. So he decides to let Billy help on the farm, "it'll put some muscle on him" (2.73).
Oh, just what Billy wants. We're so sure that backbreaking labor is just the ticket. Give the kid a Nintendo DS, fer cryin' out loud! That'll take his mind off things.

Chapter 3

Billy starts working on the farm. Has it cured him of his dog-lust? No way. He wants his coonhounds just as much as ever.
One day, while hoeing corn down by the river, Billy sees an abandoned fisherman camp. So he does what any 11-year-old boy would do: snoops around.
In the camp, he finds a sportsman's magazine that changes his life (his words not ours.)
In the back of the magazine is an ad for redbone coonhound pups, just $25 a piece. But remember this isn't $25 in the present day when that'll barely buy you a 3D movie ticket. For Billy, this is a fortune.
But that doesn't matter. At this point Billy is lost in the daydream of hound puppies.
But how is he going to find the $50 he needs for the puppies? He remembers a passage from the Bible: "God helps those who help themselves" (3.8).
Tasty brain snack: turns out, that phrase is not in the Bible. It actually comes from Greek tragedy, at least in the Western World.
Okay, back to the story. On his way home, Billy comes up with a plan to save the money. He'll sell vegetables and berries to fishermen in the summer, he'll sell whatever he could trap during the winter, and he'll save every penny he earns till he has enough to buy those hound pups.
Before he even earns a penny he starts planning their doghouse, imagining the collars he'll make and trying out names. And then probably writing those names down in his Trapper Keeper (do they still make those?) and surrounding them with little sparkly hearts.
He finds a K.C. Baking Powder can in the trash pile and shines it all up to use as a bank.
Off to work. Billy picks berries till his hands are raw and scratched; he traps and skins animals, then sells the hides at his grandpa's store; and he saves. Every penny.
At one point his grandpa asks him what he is doing with the money he earns, and Billy tells him all about the pups.
Billy asks if he'll order them for him when he has the money, since you probably have to be 18 or older and all. His grandpa agrees, but totally doesn't believe that Billy can really save all that money.
Cue montage. Weeks pass. Then months. Finally, after two long, slow years Billy earns the money he needs.
After counting his money over and over like some Scrooge McDuck, he runs down to his grandpa's store.
His grandpa is so surprised that there's a minute when he thinks Billy might have stolen the money.
But when Billy clears it up for him, his grandpa starts to tear up and tells him he'll order the pups for him.
Now comes the awesome part. His grandpa hands him a candy bag, and tells him to fill it up. So, Billy's getting his dogs and a bag of candy.
Seriously, can life get any better?
Now, it's been a long time since Billy had any candy. A long, long time. So, you'd expect him to sit down outside the door and scarf it up right away.
Instead, he takes it him, spreads it out on the bed, and shares it with his younger sisters.
Aw, what a guy, right? All our brother ever gave us was wedgies. (Just kidding, bro! We love you!)